Still Catholic, despite hierarchy

Credit: The Associated Press

This June 30, 2010 file photo shows Pope Benedict XVI blessing faithful as he leaves St. Peter's square at the Vatican at the end of his weekly general audience.

Credit: Herald graphic

Boston Herald columnist Margery Eagan

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In this Sunday, March 22, 2009 file photo, Pope Benedict XVI arrives in the popemobile to celebrate a Mass on the outskirts of Angola's seaside capital, Luanda, the last major event before the end of the visit on the following day.

Credit: The Associated Press

In this April 9, 2009 file photo, Pope Benedict XVI offers a nun the Holy Communion, a Chrism Mass inside St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican, as Benedict XVI celebrated a Holy Thursday Mass that included the traditional blessing of holy oils - some of which the church will send to an earthquake zone as a sign of closeness to the stricken population.

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In this Friday, Sept. 12, 2008 file photo, Pope Benedict XVI waves to wellwishers as he leaves the Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris, following a vespers service.

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In this photo provided by the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, Pope Benedict XVI, center, leaves after attending a meeting of Vatican cardinals where he read a document in Latin in which he announced his resignation, at the Vatican, Monday, Feb. 11, 2013.

Credit: The Associated Press

In this Sunday, April 24, 2005 file photo, Archbishop Piero Marini drapes Pope Benedict XVI with the pallium during his installment Mass in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican. Pope Benedict XVI announced Monday, Feb. 11, 2013, he would resign Feb. 28 because he is simply too old to carry on.

Credit: The Associated Press

In this April 28, 2009 file photo provided then by the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, Pope Benedict XVI stands by the salvaged remains of Pope Celestine V, in the 13th-century Santa Maria di Collemaggio Basilica, the symbol of the city of L'Aquila, whose roof partially caved in during the quake.

Credit: The Associated Press

In this photo provided by the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, Pope Benedict XVI delivers his blessing at the end of a meeting of Vatican cardinals, at the Vatican, Monday, Feb. 11, 2013.

Credit: The Associated Press

In this photo provided by the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, Pope Benedict XVI delivers his message at the end of a meeting of Vatican cardinals, at the Vatican, Monday, Feb. 11, 2013. Benedict XVI announced Monday that he would resign Feb. 28 - the first pontiff to do so in nearly 600 years.

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It’s possible that the increasingly conservative College of Cardinals will select a new pope who’s less obsessed with everybody’s sex lives.

My Catholic heart would leap with joy.

But that’s not likely.

The cardinals could be fooled, of course. In 1958 they selected 77-year-old Pope John XXIII expecting an easily manipulated pushover. Instead, he convened Vatican II and revolutionized the church.

But fooling ’em twice is not likely, either.

Yet that’s OK. Most deeply faithful Catholics I know — great priests, nuns, the devoted in my parish and my family — remain in this troubled church in spite of the hierarchy, not because of it. There is one silver lining of the sex abuse cover-up: It stripped the hierarchy of its already compromised moral authority. That freed Catholics to ignore bishops’ reactionary rants against gays and women. They’re on the wrong side of history, and of justice.

During the last election, when American bishops joined right-wing Republicans to fulminate about the horrors of birth control, one elderly nun I know — who’s dedicated her life to poor women — would just roll her eyes. I’d praise her by name, but the zealots might run her out of town. It wouldn’t be the first time an uppity nun was hounded by “holy” men around here. In fact, “radical” American nuns were in Pope Benedict’s crosshairs, deviant priests on the back burner.

Friends ask me a lot: How can you still be a Catholic? I get the question lately at funerals when priests, who may not even know the deceased, embarrass everybody by battling grieving families over post-Mass eulogies: how many, how long and who in the family is “allowed” to deliver them? At a recent funeral in Dorchester, the priest actually interrupted the middle-aged son midway through his tribute to his mother. Wrap it up, there, sonny boy.

I got the question again over the blizzard weekend when the Archdiocese of Boston felt duty-bound to announce that Catholics were off the hook, mortal sin-wise, on our Sunday Mass obligation.

As if — with cars entombed in snow and many streets impassable — any grown-up Catholics actually feared their only choices were to risk their lives or their immortal souls.

I’m not going to detail again today why I remain, despite it all, a Catholic. But I’ll say this. It’s got nothing to do with this pope, the next one, the cardinals or the bishops. They’ve been misbehaving for 2,000 years. Quite clearly, they’re not done yet.